Facebook advertising can be effective, but it’s also very easy to waste money. This Concise Webinar focuses on how to improve your results, and also highlights traps to avoid, especially if you are a beginner at Facebook advertising.
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Gareth: So welcome to how to get better results from Facebook ads. It was going to be presented by two of us and hopefully he (Richard) comes back in shortly but in while we wait for him I will continue on. Most of you should probably know who I am. My name’s Gareth. I’m one of the directors of Concise and today we are running a Facebook ad workshop and how to get the best out of it.
For those of you that may not have attended one of these webinars before all of our webinars are 100% educational. There’s no sales pitch. I’ll try not to do any waffle and they usually last about 20 minutes. If you can’t make it until the end they do get recorded and they do go on YouTube and on our website. Fear not if you get distracted or you get bored you can always watch it later. Before we begin as I say this will be recorded this webinar and will be available later. If you want a copy please send us an email. Feel free to post a question at any time. We’ll try our best to get through everybody otherwise we’ll keep it short and we’ll finish in about 20-25 minutes.
When Facebook came out many years ago there was a lot of people who jumped on to the social platform from a user point of view. Facebook way back originally was never really intended to be an ad platform. It started out as a social network but as with most capitalism comes people who want to make a shit ton of money out of things and so it then turned into one of the largest advertising platforms in the world so much so that last year they did 70 billion dollars, that’s billion with a B in ad revenue.
Considering they don’t sell a physical product and they only sell space on a page 70 billion us dollars is quite a lot of money and unfortunately most of that ad revenue came from small businesses, mums and dads who generally and this is a very general comment don’t make a return on Facebook ads. I thought we would run this webinar to sort of give you a bit of some top tips about if you are going to run any Facebook ads yourself things to watch out for and how to get the best out of it.
What Facebook doesn’t want you to know is publicly Facebook is a public company on the share market however Mr. Zuckerberg who always seems to look like the nice guy in his gray t-shirt has the controlling uh stock via a very clever little share strategy that someone put together and so you you’re effectively interacting with a platform that’s owned and controlled by one person. This person is one of the wealthiest people in the world so as much as they pretend to be a nice person and do all the wonderful things for philanthropy and all those sorts of things you just have to remember right down at the at the guts of it you’ve got an individual who is making a lot of money and their personal wealth is going up.
The other thing a few people may not be familiar with is that Facebook actually owns these other platforms messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. Most people would know those platforms or know of them and between those four platforms they pretty much have just about every English-speaking person inside their platform. You’re talking something like three to four billion users across all of their network which are all owned by the parent company of Facebook. What it means from an advertising point of view is that you don’t necessarily have to do ads inside Facebook you can put ads inside Facebook messenger or Instagram or WhatsApp. There’s many, many different ways of advertising via the Facebook ad manager that you may not have considered in the past.
The golden rule with any advertising or any marketing but particularly with Facebook ads is to know your customer. When you’ve got a pool of four billion people to choose from you need to make sure that you really control your ads very, very, very, very tightly so that you’re not getting wastage. Facebook ads do work for the right businesses and Instagram ads do work for the right businesses but you really need to ask yourself the first question and that is are they even on Facebook right?
I always use my dad as a classic. He is a retired 63 year old engineer who has no interest in using a mobile phone half the day, never mind on Facebook. If your target customer looks like my dad then Facebook is not the best way to get to him. Don’t just assume that everybody is on Facebook and you should only use Facebook ads. Facebook ads can be used as a really good strategy in lots of marketing campaigns but really ask yourself who is my target customer and are they even on Facebook. If you’re trying to target 18 year old kids at uni or millennials whatever you want to call them then they’re probably also not on Facebook but they may exist in Instagram or WhatsApp and so on. It’s a matter of picking the right platform for the right market.
This slide I have open here gives you a bit of an idea of the sorts of things that you can target. One of the things Facebook doesn’t want you to know is that a lot of the ways of reducing spend which goes against their shareholder concept is to control the ads based on demographic targeting. Demographic targeting is things like age, gender, education, where they work, relationships whether or not they’re single, divorced, engaged, married. Language, English, mandarin, so on and then location.
If you imagine that you are a jeweller and your primary product is say engagement rings then you would definitely want to be using the relationship status because there wouldn’t be a lot of point you targeting people who are either married or divorced or possibly even engaged because they would not be in the market for those rings. If you went for an engaged relationship status then there’s a probability that they may be in the market for a ring or they may be in the market for a wedding ring. It’s really important to think about each product, each ad, each customer before you start running and building a Facebook ad.
Language, also really important often forgotten. A lot of people just put any language but their website and their ads are written in English. Just imagine if you’re showing an English ad to someone whose primary language is mandarin you’ve just wasted that traffic because that person can’t or wasted that spend because that person can’t interact with that ad. Things like age, gender, if you’re selling a product that is specific to agenda or most likely to be purchased by a decision maker. I know in my marriage many of the important decisions are not made by me so you might as well advertise to my wife rather than myself. Keep that in mind as well.
Then you can start drilling down into all these little kind of advanced features so these are the sorts of little menus that the Facebook ad manager hides from you that you really start getting quite useful so you could say well I want to target females who are between the age of 25 and 35 but that could be a million users. Trying to show ads to those people and on a budget of say a thousand dollars your ads will last about 30 seconds and you probably have a failed campaign.
Interests can be very broad. How Facebook gets this data is if you are scrolling through your Facebook feed and you start liking posts about financial news and ASX and stocks and shares and so on then the Facebook bot is going to tag your profile against those interest groups and then so when the advertiser comes along and says well I’ve got a product, a financial product for 25 to 35 year old males then they can target someone like me because I’m a male, I’m in the age group and I have an interest in finance. Then it’s likely to be a far more specific ad which will get a much better return and keep in mind you’re paying every time someone sees an ad or every time someone clicks on an ad so the more specific you can be the better.
Life events as I sort of covered uh with the marriage and relationships. You can do things like changing career or starting a new job. If you have a product that is aimed at people who changed careers or as something like that or getting a pay rise. Like say I’ve got a pay rise and then I started a new job then I’d like to be in the market to buy something or an upgrade, upgrade a house, refinance my mortgage. Something like that you can target live events. Lifestyle, demographic targeting so this gives you options to target things that people love going out in the morning or they love travel or a really good one with this is if you’re a you know local coffee shop. I’ve often seen local coffee shops running ads 24 hours of the day not many people go out and buy coffee at 2 o’clock in the morning. What I find really interesting is most of those coffee shops are not open at 2 o’clock in the morning so why are you running an ad.
Ideal time to run an ad if you’re a coffee shop and a local coffee shop would be say at 10 a.m. or 1 p.m. that sort of afternoon sort of coffee time and then then you run a simple ad to maybe 500 meters around your coffee store between one and two o’clock in the afternoon saying free delivery in the local area or feeling like a coffee with freshly brewed. Little things like that. It’s really thinking about your customer and setting times a day, setting language that sort of thing.
Connections, this is a really powerful one particularly if you have a product that is a trust based product like say a restaurant or a food type product or a gym or a membership type thing because if you have say 500 Facebook followers or Instagram followers whichever platform then you can control the Facebook ad manager to find people that look like the same people. It’s called a look-alike audience and if you have a really good solid following of fans then through the Facebook ad manager you can use that to find more people that have the same kind of interest, same sort of demographics and so on so that’s a really good strategy.
Behaviors, you can target users who have made a specific action. If someone like let’s say someone went to your website and they went through a number of different pages and then there was a pattern emerging then the Facebook ad manager could then control ads based on those behaviors. It looks for patterns or if they sort of checked into a local cafe every week, every Monday for a year then that would have a pattern that you could target and they’re probably going to be a VIP customer so you might show them a VIP ad. There’s little things you can do like that.
Then there’s this concept called retargeting which most people should be familiar with. If you’re not familiar with retargeting all this means is when you say go to a website and then maybe you leave something in your, you buy a product but you leave it in the car and then all of a sudden five minutes later you see it on your Facebook feed saying here’s a ten percent off coupon voucher to come and check out. That’s called retargeting or remarketing. It means the same thing. I find that these ads particularly are done really poorly because I constantly am finding myself seeing ads that I’ve already bought.
I might buy a something keyboard say from a computer shop and then all of a sudden on my Facebook page I see the keyboard that I’ve just bought. That’s the dumbest thing in the world in my opinion because I’ve already bought it and I don’t need to see the ad anymore. If you’re going to do retargeting make sure you think about the retargeting, the remarketing ads properly and so that you’re only really showing ads to people that are likely to re-engage with you and you’re not just wasting money on just showing ads to people that have already checked out, already purchased so really important thing to think of.
My absolute favorite and probably bug bear of the whole thing is this Facebook ad manager screen called locations and they do this really crafty little thing where they automatically select the country that you’re in. To an untrained eye it looks pretty obvious. I’m in Australia. It’ll be Australia or in this example the US but what a lot of people don’t seem to notice is the little number on the right hand side that says potential reach 220 million. No way in any ad campaign should I be showing an ad to the entire population of the US. There is no product that I can even think of perhaps other than a Covid 19 vaccination that would appeal to 220 million people.
It’s really, really important to have location demographics set up in your ad campaigns and even more important if you are a business that only operates in a local area. If you have a lawn mowing business or an electric, electrician’s business or a plumber or something like that then the most probable customers are going to be in a local region. You can control location down to postcodes. You can control location down to suburbs. You can control location down to cities, states. There are a few little sort of issues with volume so if you get really, really specific with it sometimes the ad manager will tell you that there’s not enough people in that region for it to show ads to. You can also select things like people who pass through that location or stay regularly within that location.
For example if you were targeting people up and down the train line then you’re getting a lot of people that are passing through that location who are not necessarily in that location. You need to be careful with location targeting as well if you’re a local business to exclude out any locations that are likely to have a lot of moving traffic. If you were near the airport and you would want to exclude the airport from your ad campaign if you’re a local business because there’s a lot of people coming and going that you wouldn’t want to show ads to.
Other things you can do is a lot of people I see seem to only have one ad campaign and one location and that sort of defeats the idea of a split test. What you really want to sort of look at is doing multiple campaigns. Yes it takes longer to do but it allows you to allocate budget to the best performing so for example if you’re in the united states and you had a campaign for sunscreen then you are far likely to get a better conversion in California than you are in say Alaska because more people are likely to use sunscreen at certain times of the year. If you’re going to run a campaign that is seasonal or state weather specific then you want to be really, really thoughtful on the location settings and probably change your allocations throughout the year and change your ads because in the US you can have many, many seasons in one day and particularly in Melbourne that springs to mind.
You can you can have all sorts of seasonal and weather issues in Melbourne if you’re targeting in Melbourne. Really think about the product, the weather, the time of the year, autumn, summer, winter and control your ads per state at a minimum. Ideally go down into localities or suburb levels but ideally do it a city or a state level. Definitely don’t have the um Australia box turned on.
Next tip is to remember to hook up google analytics so this is a stats program that is installed on your website. This is very important if you’re running a business, sorry running a Facebook ad that you are likely to have your action from your Facebook ad is to get to the website because you want to know in google analytics what people are doing. So this very simple example I have here tells you how many people came from the Facebook ads. It tells you how many of those people were new so they’d never been there before. It tells you how many pages they looked at. It tells you how their average session duration and a really, really good little rookie mistake that a lot of people make with Facebook ads and other ads is that they the ads get shown inside games.
Facebook owns a lot of the games like Candy Crush and they use those games to show ads. They put the ads, if you’ve ever noticed in very annoying little places that your thumb happens to scroll over. If you get your phone out now and one of my favorite bug bears is the weather zone app. If you open the weather zone app you will find that the ad at the bottom of the page is almost overlaid over the top of the back and the home button for your phone. What happens is the ad manager or Facebook if you like gets paid when you accidentally click. Then in google analytics what you’ll see in the average session duration is a 0.01 of a second and what that means is someone’s accidentally clicked on that ad and then they’ve hit the website. Oh no that’s not what I wanted. Gone back to the game.
You times that out by four billion users. There’s a lot of easy revenue that Facebook can make that you probably shouldn’t have so that’s one of the other things to double check is placements and where you want your ads to be shown. You don’t necessarily want them in games and mobile apps and so on. Google Analytics is a really good place to identify that potential issue.
Another really good sort of option for a lot of people that I think is a really great tool, it has lots of usage is the Facebook messenger chat so this is just simply live chat. Ignore all the website is just a bit highlighted in red at the bottom of the page here. The live chat in the past has typically been a pay per subscription type product. Facebook messenger chat is free. It takes all of about 10 minutes to install on a website unless there’s some specific issue with it but it integrates completely with Facebook and what’s really powerful is you can control ads inside there.
If someone comes into your website and they engage with you on Facebook messenger chat then you can then advertise to that person so the next time that they come back you can show them a promo or you can show them a coupon or you can suggest questions to them. You can build a really integrated, very automatic sales journey inside the Facebook messenger chat. The Facebook messenger chat itself is free however you obviously need to pay for the ads. I find that one’s a really good one, really easy to use as well. You get really good engagement in it because people usually don’t start a chat with you unless you’re generally interested in doing something so that’s a good little tip.
This is the sort of my golden rule is just remember that F is for shareholders not for business as much as they do a lovely song and dance about being the good people and it’s a free network. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Facebook is free for you as users only so that they can get as many people as possible into their distribution so that they can give advertisers the option to advertise to anyone in the world. Everything around the Facebook business model is built around shareholder returns. If you do have a Facebook ad account you would no doubt have had a phone call from a very lovely person from Facebook who would be telling you how they can make your campaign much better and they’re here to help you. They’ll help you get the best out of Facebook.
They have no interest in helping you whatsoever other than delivering a return for shareholders. Just remember that Facebook is a publicly listed American company and their overall mandate above everything else is to deliver returns for shareholders. Everything that they would suggest, everything that they would write on their Facebook help, Facebook support, any articles you read on the internet very likely being put out by Facebook, every one of those articles are very likely to be written with delivering shareholder returns.
Last little tip is and this one’s really a tip if you were paying a third party to manage this on your behalf is who’s actually paying for the ads. There are some sneaky digital marketing companies who are taking slices of ad fees or not allowing the business owner to access the actual ad manager itself and then charging a margin. It’s very straightforward for you to get access to the ad manager yourself. You should be just paying for the ads directly. There are some good little tips if you’re running ads in different countries particularly if they’re charged in US dollars because if you’re paying currency conversion fees you’re probably looking at it for adding about five percent to your cost whereas there are some really good new systems and businesses out there that are removing that. You can kind of be charged and billed in US dollars.
If you want some tips on that feel free to send me an email and particularly important if you’re spending sort of upwards of five, ten thousand dollars a month in a foreign currency. 5% does start making quite a big difference so there’s some good things you can do for that. That’s it from a Facebook ads point of view. I feel like I might need a rest unless anyone has any questions feel free to put them in the chat.
Richard: Hello everybody. Gareth, can you hear me?
Gareth: He’s back.
Richard: I disappeared but I have been listening intently. You can ask questions now guys but as you can see on the screen at the minute the next webinar is coming up in two weeks’ time and that’s about website content and tips for improving website content so if you have any issues or questions around how to get words put together for your website and how to do it yourself or how to get people to help you with it then next web webinar will be helpful for that one. If you’ve got any questions please now’s a great time to ask Gareth. That was a very good session Gareth. I actually plugged back into most of that.
Gareth: You had disappeared to make coffees then.
Richard: I know. Yes, the internet decided to drop out on me which is kind of fun. Okay. Tony had a question at one stage about exclusions, Gareth. This is about managing exclusions. Being able to exclude different areas.
Gareth: Ah yes, okay. Very good tip. Yes so as if I just rewind a second. I haven’t got any actual example open however just like being able to control say a location so you want to like let’s say you went into the ad manager and said United States. You could then exclude California or you could say all people but I specifically want to exclude female. There’s lots of different options but it’s like rather than going through the effort of individually breaking it down which would be my first preference then there is an option for you to also exclude things. You can probably just about make it out under the bottom of the screen there in blue. It says exclude people so yeah it’s a really good tactic. It all comes back to knowing your customer.
My golden tip for people who or clients when they want to run any type of advertising is don’t even open your computer until you have drawn out on a piece of paper exactly who your ideal customer is, what do they look like, where are they, how old are they, what language do they speak. What are their credentials and be really, really specific. You can have multiple of them. You don’t have to have one type of customer. You might have five different types of customers but be really, really specific.
Richard: One of the other points about exclusions was also about retargeting and to exclude purchases in retargeting so that when you’re retargeting exclude purchases i.e. people who have bought. Peter has asked, can you explain differences between engagements versus people reached.
Gareth: Okay, good question. So engagements this is somewhat difficult to explain without seeing it but engagements is like when you want to build a discussion inside an ad comment so a good example was a an expo that we ran some ads for in Perth. We wanted people to tag their friends so we built an ad that showed to a specific group of people about an expo that they would be probably interested in. What we did was encourage those people to tag their friends. You’re effectively getting free bang for buck without having to advertise to those secondary people. You’re leveraging the people who have already been shown the ad to tag their friends into it and say oh bring a friend along to the expo. That’s an example of engagement. You’re trying to get people to engage inside your post or your ad whereas people reached is more of a if you think like a TV campaign versus a Google Ad campaign.
A TV campaign is a good advertising option for telling all of WA that Victoria is excluded from flying into WA. It’s a really sort of good bang for buck to get a message across to a lot of people. No one needs to engage in it. It’s just a good way of telling a whole heap of people. Peter, obviously I know your business so a good reach campaign would be putting a new franchise into a new suburb. You would show an ad to as many people as possible in that suburb with a friendly picture of your new franchisee saying this person’s now available in your area. You don’t really need them to engage with you. You don’t really need them to make comment. You just want them to know that you’re there whereas if you were to do an engaged post it would be something like available for bookings. We have two slots available this Friday. If you’d like a discount please you know message us. That’s an engagement post.
Richard: Okay there’s another, oh did you want to add to that? Sorry.
Gareth: No, that’s it.
Richard: Okay another question from Sean. Gareth, for Australia do you have a recommendation for daily ad spend?
Gareth: As low as possible until you prove that it works. That comes with a few other issues because there is kind of a bit of a sweet spot for getting results but a lot of people say I’ll throw a grand at it and then they set up Australia and then everybody and then 10 seconds later all the ads have been used up. Your thousand dollars is gone. I would spend something that you’re comfortable with spending and make sure you do your numbers on a cost per acquisition. If you know that your sales is worth it so for every thousand dollars that you can afford to spend a hundred dollars on ads then you wouldn’t want to spend any more than a hundred dollars to get one sale. You have to kind of think about it like that. There isn’t really just a general number.
Richard: Know your cost of acquisition. What is it within the value of each sale that you are prepared to spend to acquire the customer?
Gareth: Yes so and then build it like that and start small. I have no idea what your business is Sean but if you had a local business then start in a 1K radius. If you spend all of your budget within that K then then do 2Ks and then 3Ks then 4K and keep sort of adding to it as you prove that it works. The worst thing you can do with this is spend it all in one go.
Richard: Gareth, Paul has asked does keyword targeting work in Facebook like google ads.
Gareth: Good question Paul. I could talk for an hour on that. Yes and no. Google ads has two types of general marketing. You have keyword specific search so that’s people who type into google a key term like electrician Perth say. That doesn’t work anything like keyword targeting in Facebook however google ads then has a display network which is actually in the weather zone app which is what I was talking to about before and you can use keyword targeting for interests and demographics. One of my favorite examples is that if you want to target people who like jelly donuts you can target people based on that.
Facebook doesn’t have a keyword well not to my knowledge anyway. I might be wrong. To my knowledge a search engine built into it that is keyword based like the google ad manager, the google search ad manager. That’s the best I can do to answer that quickly.
Richard: Just on the point about the number of sales, how much to spend Tony has actually added a comment in here that you need to get seven sales per day on average so that the Facebook algorithm works to maximum effect. That’s per ad set that you’re running. Facebook has some clever stuff happening uh behind the scenes and as there are a certain number, seven it seems to be the average uh that you need to get in order for Facebook really to work optimally for you so it is very possible to underspend and it’s equally very, very possible to overspend.
You overspend when you when you blow money quickly to audiences that will never buy or don’t buy. Under spending on Facebook is also something where you need to spend enough to have Facebook algorithm click in.
Gareth: And maybe if I could just expand on that a little bit. I mean that is very, very subjective to the type of ad you’re running and the business you’re running and so on but the point of it is that Facebook wants eyeballs right? Facebook had a big issue a couple of years ago where a lot of people jumped off Facebook and went to Instagram because they got sick of the ads. Now if the Facebook algorithm shows a whole heap of ads to the Facebook or like you and me and we don’t click on them, we don’t buy and then we mark them as really annoying and we get really annoyed with Facebook then Facebook will lose its audience. So the reason the algorithm puts preference on sales and you’ll find even if you did more than that like if you did 50 per day on average rather than then you’ll find the ads get shown more often in better places and so on because like the Facebook is giving the users what they want.
What Facebook doesn’t want to do and google is the same is show ads to people that don’t want to see them because that will make those people annoyed and they will then leave and go to another platform. Facebook bought Instagram because it lost all of its, well sorry a lot of its younger audience because we were all sick of the ads. They’ve been very careful with the way that the Instagram ad manager works and the algorithm has had a lot of changes made to it so that it’s only showing ads to people who are likely to engage with them.
Richard: Okie dokie.
Gareth: It comes back to knowing your customer. Everything revolves around that.
Richard: If you’ve got any other questions then please get in touch with us. As I say that we’re going to wrap up now. We’ve probably gone over our, we try to keep these concise. We’ve gone over our 25 minutes but thank you everybody for sticking around. I hope you’ve enjoyed this. This has been one of the most highly attended webinars that we’ve run so thank you very much.
Next one in two weeks’ time about website content and if you want any more help on any of this please give Gareth a call.
Gareth: I prefer email. Please email me. I can only do one phone call at once.
Richard: Exactly but anyway get in touch if you need any more help. It’s not just Gareth here or myself. Gareth sort of heads up the data based marketing within Concise but there’s a whole team of people who back him up with it. They are a bunch of people who actually get all the work done. There’s a lot of help here if you need any assistance. Thanks everybody for being part. You’ve done a good job today. If you want to wrap up?
Gareth: Thank you very much everybody. As I say I hope that was useful. There’s no intention to sell anyone anything. Those tips are things I’ve learned from doing this for many people over many number of years. there’s much, much more to it but say if you remember your customer and who they are then you will find that you should get results and just ask yourself are the customers that you want on Facebook in the first place. That’s rule number one. Thank you very much.
Richard: Thanks everybody. Goodbye.
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